Reddit made it impossible for blind Redditors to moderate

On July 1st 2023, an announcement was made that there were serious issues with accessibility of the main Reddit website, which is what this article is about. It meant that the main website was inadequate for moderation by their visually impaired and sighted moderators. Although it should not be needed, the way around this would be the use of third-party apps to access Reddit. That was hindered at the time due to changes a month earlier regarding the larger 2023 API controversy, that took place at the start of June.

Background

The accessibility updates were announced on June 30th. For a platform so large as Reddit, accessibility should be ensured for the large user base. The moderators tried working with Reddit, and the demo Reddit gave made it clear to the moderators that Reddit could not be used without sight, and there was no reaction to requesting a test with a screen curtain on. The third-party app RedReader did have proper accessibility features for screen reader use, but had issues with logins at the time.

Third-party apps in the API controversy

Initially all free third-party apps had to pay up the cost for accessing content of Reddit. A week later exceptions were made, the third-party app RedReader fell under the exemption for non-commercial accessibility-focused apps

Moderator response

A large part of the controversy was the lack of cooperation to make the platform accessible, when most of the work to make it accessible was already done and provided to Reddit. The main site for regular users has the required labels on the buttons such that screen readers can read what they do out loud, but they have not provided these on the moderator version of the site. In an interview about this, one of the moderators states:

There are some organizations that prioritize accessibility, and there are some organizations that kind of treat it as an afterthought. Reddit seems to have been the latter type of organization where accessibility was sort of something that they kind of went, OK, it sort of works now. And in any case, we've got these third-party apps, so it's not a big deal. Right?

This captures the lack of concern for accessibility beforehand, and explains how the combination of events created a state where the platform became really inaccessible for the moderators.